Official blog of the Sacramento Progressive Alliance, one of the largest and most vibrant progressive activist groups in California with more than 8,000 members. We educate and mobilize Progressives in Sacramento, the surrounding foothill areas, and at Sac State and Folsom Lake College.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Digital Disconnect - a review

Digital Disconnect- How Capitalism is Turning the Internet
Against Democracy.

Robert W. Mc Chesney is one of the nations’ leading analysts
of media and monopoly, and his
“Digital Disconnect- How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against
Democracy,” is an excellent
analysis of the problem where a
medium with the capacity to empower people is itself becoming a tool of social
control.

In
the first three chapters Robert McChesney provides a substantive,
sophisticated yet transparent description of the political economy of the United States. That alone justifies a read, given how too
many left activists fail at seeing the intersection of politics and economics and
end up locked into offering a far
too weak Keynesian stimulus policy
as the alternative to capitalist austerity measures. McChesney offers a better,
more complete view through rendering an astute political economy of journalism,
communications and media.

After
establishing his political economy baseline, the author documents the takeover
of the internet and much of our media by corporate oligarchs. As McChesney argues. if you have a
social system dominated by a power and economic elite, they are going to shape
new enterprises to fit their capitalist interest not only in profit making but
in propaganda. In describing the recent developments he asserts, “ As a rule, policies will be made by
elites and self interested commercial interests, unless there is a organized
popular intervention.” “ (91)

The
writer also provides an extensive
discussion of the important issue of copyright, and how the extension of
copyright by the media oligarchy substantially reduces and limits the free
sharing of ideas. (Readers not familiar with this development would do well to look
at the discussion at www.creativecommons.org.)

Corporate
rule of course is not new, though its evolving forms need to be understood. Charles Ferguson’s film, “ Inside Job”,
and the follow up book “Predator
Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”
(2012) traces finance capital’s domination of the U.S. government and how it produced the most recent
economic crisis. In “Digital Disconnect” readers benefit from the long critical
scholarly record of Robert McChesney
in studying corporate journalism as an imbedded form of corporate
capitalism and its challenge to
democracy. As he says, “capitalism
imposed its logic.” ( p.89)

McChesney combines both his extensive knowledge of political economy
and media studies to clarify several of the vital conflicts between corporate
media control and democratic interests.
In chapter 4, The Internet and Capitalism, he does not accept the fanciful utopian views of digital
democracy being promoted by the Google, Apple, Microsoft and other large
corporate conglomerates . For him, capitalism won and democracy lost. His is a valuable and needed alternative to popularly promoted views of the Net such as Eric Schmidt of Google and
Jared Cohen in he New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and
Business” (2013).

Can
we good guys win?. After detailing the
perilous decline of journalism since the emergence of the Internet,
where more that four in 10 paid
journalist positions where lost during corporate consolidation of the media and where many major
cities have been reduced to one-paper town, McChesney is not
optimistic. But the struggle continues.

In
that struggle, those of us on the Left are immensely aided by such clear, substantive arguments
about the role of media, the consolidation of media by the Murdochs and Koch
brothers of our nation, and an
analysis of how the oligarchs use the media they own to promote a neoliberal
agenda. He offers numerous examples. One he leaves out: how the corporate mouthpiece
cum think tank the Peterson Institute
created and promoted the Fix the
Debt campaign, which so successfully set
a key part of the media and political agenda for the last two years.

As
good as McChesney is, I think one conclusion is overly broad. McChesney argues
that the 2008/2009 economic collapse and the continuing economic crisis reveal,
“The system is failing, conventional policies and institutions are increasingly
discredited, and fundamental changes of one form or another are likely to come,
for better or worse.” (p.221). The fact is that while our media and telecom institutions,
including Time Warner, News Corp. Disney, General Electric, Viacom, Comcast and
others, as well as Internet giants Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft,
etc. have been widely criticized, they’ve yet to be discredited. That’s our
Achilles Heel. Too few in the
democracy movements yet understand
the importance of corporate capitalist control of our media. In that light, “Digital
Disconnect” is an excellent book for
moving the progressive agenda and building
a movement that knows you can’t have a democratic society without a democratic
media.

Activists
will greatly benefit from
McChesney’s clear and substantive analysis of how capitalism undermined a potential for democratic
media and the democratic project itself.
I urge all to read this
important book to understand the
depth and complexity of capitalist control of the internet, of media , and how
they use their control to dominate our elections, our government and to prevent
the development of democracy.

Duane
Campbell. With editorial assistance from Michael Hirsch.

Duane
Campbell is a professor (emeritus) of bilingual multicultural education at
California State University Sacramento. His most recent book is Choosing
Democracy: a Practical Guide to Multicultural Education. He is on the editorial
committee of this blog and he blogs at www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com

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